Hungry for Truth, Peace and Justice

Trying to come to terms with mass slaughter

Report from Rwanda, Genocide Museum
By Jim Handman
CBC News
July 30, 2009

They call Rwanda the "land of a thousand hills." But sometimes it can feel like the land of a thousand questions.

For one, how is it possible that these apparently gentle, quiet people could massacre — in the most brutal manner imaginable — more than 800,000 of their friends, neighbours and colleagues over the course of just three months?

And how can they now coexist, side-by-side, building the "new Rwanda"?

Yes, the Rwandan genocide is 15 years behind us this month. But that doesn't feel like such a long time in the history of something so horrible.

To seek some answers, I went with some colleagues to the Genocide Museum in the capital, Kigali.

It is a fairly new, modest building, surrounded by memorial gardens. On the main floor is a highly detailed and well-presented chronology of the genocide, its history, context and aftermath.

It contains some video testimony from survivors and the families of victims as well as some graphic photos of corpses.

It also exhibits some damning descriptions of how the world turned its back on Rwanda during the genocide.

Where was the UN?

Rather than come to Rwanda's aid, the UN actually pulled its troops out of this central African country at the height of the massacre, leaving its presiding officer, Canadian general Romeo Dallaire, hung out to dry.

Dallaire, now a senator, has said that he could have stopped the slaughter with just 5,000 troops and the proper mandate.

Instead, the UN decreased his force from 2,500 to just 250 helpless peacekeepers, who were forced to stand by and watch the genocide unfold.

One of the posters in the museum notes that the number of European troops that came to help evacuate Westerners in that spring and summer would have been enough to stop the genocide — had they stayed.

The French come under particular attack, since they arrived near the very end and their attempt to set up a so-called safe zone in the country, under a controversial mission called Operation Turquoise, appears to have helped some of the Hutu killers escape.

The most moving part of the museum is the final room, filled with large blow-up pictures of some of the many children who died in the genocide.

It lists their names, favourite pastimes and hobbies, and the manner in which they were killed: decapitated with a machete, speared, smashed against a wall.

It is difficult to read and I skip most of them.

Not alone

On the second floor is an exhibit dedicated to the other genocides of the 20th century: the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge slaughter of one-quarter of the population of Cambodia, and the Bosnian wars of the 1990s.

It is a brilliant idea — to show that this kind of unspeakable horror is not just a product of some kind of primitive, African savagery. But rather a product of man's inhumanity to man, of which no group has a monopoly.

It leaves a strong and lasting impression, as well as a sense of despair.

To understand more about what happened here, we go on another day to the Genocide Memorial at Murambi, about a half-hour drive from Butare, where we are living.

There are many of these memorials around the country, but this one marks the location of one of the largest single massacres of 1994. As many as 50,000 Tutsis sought refuge here, during the height of the killings, at a technical college on a hillside.

They were surrounded by the Hutu army and a Hutu militia, known as the Interahamwe.
For the sheltering Tutsis, their food and water was cut off for two weeks. And then the militia and soldiers moved in to kill — 50,000 men, women and children slaughtered in a day.

Rooms of skeletons

The memorial consists of room after room in the college filled with skeletons, carefully placed on large white wooden tables.

The bodies have been coated with lime to preserve them and they glisten white in the light. The smell of the odour-control balls in the rooms is overwhelming.

But what you notice most are the number of tiny bodies — babies, children, teens — many with smashed skulls.

They have all been exhumed from the mass graves on the site and placed in the rooms where they were slaughtered. The impact is overwhelming and incomprehensible.

Behind the college is a grassy area with a sign that reads: "Here the French troops played volley (ball) during Operation Turquoise."

The sign is just metres away from a huge mass grave and you can't help but conclude these soldiers must have known what had gone on at that spot.

They must have seen the blood in the rooms. The graves would have been fresh.

A wife remembers

We were taken on a tour of the rooms by a woman who works there, herself a survivor of the massacre. She tells us, in French, that her husband, a Tutsi, saved her life.

She is a Hutu, who was married to a Tutsi. When the militia came to kill them, her husband showed them her identity card, which identified her as a Hutu — and they made her run away with the baby on her back.

Then they murdered her husband and her other two young children.

She tells us that she works here at the memorial as a duty to the memory of her family.

She is unemotional and direct. She does this every day. We come away numb.

Collective responsibility

One of the many writers on Rwanda that I have read in recent weeks noted that the genocide could have been much more efficient.

After all, the Rwandan army (entirely Hutu) was very well armed, by the French, with the latest weaponry.

But instead of shooting Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the militia killed them with primitive weapons — machetes, spears, hoes, clubs — one at a time.

The idea, it was said, was to involve as many people as possible in the killings, to spread the blame and the responsibility.

That might explain why more than one million Hutus fled the country when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded and stopped the genocide.

What now?

At this point, it seems, Rwanda is still coming to grips with the aftermath of the killings.

In 2001, the government established a system of community courts, known as Gacacas, to try those responsible.

The crimes range from robbery and looting to rape and murder. There are 12,000 of these courts in a country of only eight million people and the result is that those who are judging know the accused very well.

At the Gacacas, sentences have been handed out, although many people who expressed guilt were pardoned and allowed to return to their communities.

The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, has said that if they incarcerated all the people involved in the genocide, they would have no country left.

The leaders of the genocide are being tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania. But the process there is painfully slow.

In fact, only last week was the former governor of Kigali convicted of genocide, murder and rape, and sentenced to life. It had taken 15 years to bring him to justice.

The government of Rwanda is also frustrated with the European countries that refuse to extradite alleged Hutu killers who have been given asylum in their countries. Britain is one of them.

But it applauds Canada for recently convicting a Montreal man for his involvement in the massacre.

When you drive in the countryside, you often see groups of men in pink jumpsuits, working in the fields beside the highways. They are "genocidaires," men who have been convicted of crimes related to the genocide and are now in prison. We are prohibited from taking their pictures.

We ask people here if something like this could happen again.

They say yes — if the Hutu majority takes power again. That seems unlikely. The Tutsi minority now controls the government and the military and they are committed to the idea of erasing ethnic identities.

They want a country where everyone is just a Rwandan. It is a noble ideal, but is it realistic? We can only hope.
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Postscript:
A few days after this story appeared, someone threw at grenade at the Genocide Museum in Kigala from a passing motorcycle. Two passersby were injured.

It was the third attack on the museum in just over a year. Significantly, perhaps, grenades were a favourite weapon of the Hutu militias during the genocide. They would be tossed into churches and rooms where Tutsis were hiding.

Note:
Jim Handman is Executive Producer with the CBC show Quirks & Quarks. He is teaching journalism this summer at the National University of Rwanda.

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posted by Mamadou Kouyate @ 5:12 PM